I remember still being a child at school in Germany. Once we had a break and were playing at the schoolyard. It was a typical cloudy day but suddenly the sun shined through the clouds and I said to my friend Andreas: hey look, the sun (der Sonne) is shining like in Spain.
Suddenly a deep voice from the background corrected me: Manuel, it`s the sun (die Sonne). It was one of our teachers. Although I insisted that it`s (der Sonne) because it was the same sun as in Spain and in Spanish we say (el sol, sun is masculine) he convinced me that in German sun is not masculine but feminine.
From that moment on I knew that although the sun is the same for everybody I would have some trouble growing up with 2 languages.
Today I hear German students so many times making similar mistakes with the articles and I think to myself: how damn frustrating this must be for someone that is now starting to learn German compared to me, and I was born there.
So what is the German article all about and how to master it?
English speakers are usually not very familiar with nouns having any gender at all. The definite article is always “the” no matter if it’s a masculine or feminine word.
In German we love articles and we have a lot of them for each gender. Let me show you the most popular ones: we use “der” for masculine words, “die” for feminine words and there is this strange additional neuter article “das”.
Here are some simple examples: der Mann (the man), die Frau (the woman), das Auto (the car). Until now, no problem right? Ok, the car (das Auto) could be either masculine or feminine depending if it’s a BMW or a Mini Cooper (I’m just kidding) but we could agree to use a so called neuter article since it is a vehicle or machine and not that masculine or feminine.
But German wouldn’t be such an interesting language if everything would be that easy. So here are some other examples to just confuse you a little bit but show you also the beautiful diversity of our language: der Ozean (the ocean), die See (the sea), das Meer (the ocean). Wow, three words with almost meaning the same but using all three different articles.
I love to take it to the limit so let me give you the last most beautiful example: “Die Frau gibt der Frau die Rose. “ (The woman gives to the (other) woman the rose.)
Wow, isn’t this art? For the same two words “Frau” in one sentence we use “die” and “der”.
How could the gender of the second woman suddenly change to a male person. (Well, actually she hasn’t really changed and it’s just the way to establish in German the relation between the first woman and the second one. We just use an article here and no preposition.)
I think you got the point: You’ve probably heard everyone tell you how important these articles are. But when you tried to learn them, there seemed to be NO LOGIC at all! And when you looked into a textbook, everyone just expects you to memorize them, without offering any real help
Don’t worry, I have a quick solution for you that will make it a lot easier for you to learn and use these articles correctly.
There are different approaches than in traditional textbooks, that I have found that lead to much better results when dealing with the German articles.
Let me explain you today one very powerful method based on the researches of Dr. Horst Sperber in his book: Mnemonics in language learning, that can make a big difference in mastering the articles.
I want to show you a few word endings that will help you reveal the right gender and article. I know this can look overwhelming, but DON’T FREAK OUT. You won’t actually need to learn all of these endings.
der -ig-ling-or-ismus
das -tum-chen-ma-ment-um-lein
die -heit-ung-keit-ei-schaft-ion-ität-ik
Now the trick here is not to learn these endings one by one, instead learn them as one word:
der iglingorismus
das tumchenmamentumlein
die heitungkeiteischaftionitätik
The endings are combined together in a way that you can pronounce them as a word. These words do not have a meaning, but contain in this way, 18 bits of information in just 3 words. Maybe they could be the names of this strange German Article Virus.
You can start saying them very slowly the first 10 times, then with time you will get more comfortable with them.
For example the word:
die -heit-ung-keit-ei-schaft-ion-ität-ik
might be too long so you can start dividing it in two words:
die -heit-ung-keit-ei
die -schaft-ion-ität-ik
Here are three audios where I show you step by step how to progress from the first time you try to repeat them until you feel more confident.
der -ig-ling-or-ismus
das -tum-chen-ma-ment-um-lein
die -heit-ung-keit-ei-schaft-ion-ität-ik
You will find some exceptions but not many, as these endings are very reliable. Without even understanding the word you will now be able to recognize the gender of almost 20% of the Nouns.
Let’s play a little game and see how you can apply them actually. Let’s try to guess the articles of these Nouns:
_ Mädchen (girl)
_ Honig (honey)
_ Schmetterling (butterfly)
_ Zeitung (newspaper)
You anticipate it? Our logic would lead us to think in some cases differently. For example that Mädchen is feminine or honey doesn’t really seem very masculine (unless we would see the incredible Hulk sipping on some honey).
But now with the help of our endings we know the correct articles:
das Mädchen
der Honig
der Schmetterling
die Zeitung
I encourage you to really make the effort to learn these endings as one word. It definitely will take time to remember them (I actually needed a few days bothering my kids, using them as magical spells for my tricks) but once you have them, you will remember the endings right away and be able to deal with confidence with a good portion of nouns.
It really takes much more time to learn 100 articles of 100 words, then learning 18 endings, sufficient to identify all the 100 articles.
You don’t believe me? Try to guess the articles of these 100 common German Nouns here:
You’re now more than ready to go for it!
In this next post I’ll show how to deal with rest of the nouns.